All of those puzzled as to why HP would enter the data warehouse appliance market with some time back Neoview now have an answer – they indeed should have stayed well clear. The old saying goes that if HP was to market sushi they would call it “cold, dead fish”, and the Neoview marketing team seemed to take this philosophy to heart. The product had only attracted a few customers, and I struggled to even find anyone in HP willing to talk about it.

HP finally put Neoview out of its misery this week. It is tough for companies to market technologies outside of their core business, and this is a good example of how even such a powerful company as HP can appear (to continue to tomrnet the tortured metaphor) like a fish out of water when it is not selling servers or printers (or printer cartridges, which I believe is where the money really is in that business).

There will be much chortling amongst competitors, but this is also a sign that the appliance market is pretty crowded, and that it is far from an easy one to succeed in, even fior a big fish like HP.

It is remarkable how few companies make any effort at all to address data quality, which if left to fester can not only be embarassing to a company but also cost it real money. Yet in our surveys we see that barely a quarter of companies attempt to even measure their own data quality.